Pearl Harbor medal

Seventy-six years later, chaplain who died saving lives to be honored.

Seventy-six years after he died at Pearl Harbor, a Navy chaplain who helped sailors escape from a sinking battleship is scheduled to be honored with the Silver Star Medal on Thursday in a ceremony at his alma mater in Iowa.

Lt. j.g. Aloysius Schmitt, a Catholic priest from St. Lucas, Iowa, will posthumously receive the thirdhighest decoration for valor in combat during a ceremony at Loras College, in Dubuque.

Navy Chief of Chaplains Rear Adm. Margaret Kibben will present the medal to family members during a ceremony on the campus.

Schmitt was buried in a special crypt there after his remains were identified last year by experts with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

He had been aboard the USS Oklahoma when it was torpedoed and capsized during the attack on Dec. 7, 1941.

His remains were not accounted for at first, because the bodies of most of the sailors and Marines recovered from the ship were too jumbled and decomposed to be identified.

Schmitt, 32, had just said Mass that Sunday morning when the Oklahoma was hit by at least nine Japanese torpedoes.

The battleship, with its complement of 1,300, quickly rolled over in 50 feet of water, trapping hundreds of men below decks.

Thirty-two were saved by rescue crews who heard them banging for help, cut into the hull and made their way through a maze of darkened, flooded compartments to reach them.

Others managed to escape by swimming underwater to find their way out.

A few managed to escape through portholes, saved by brave comrades such as Schmitt, who is said to have helped as many as 12 sailors get out of a small compartment.

In 1942, he was honored with the noncombat Navy and Marine Corps Medal.

But after recent appeals by supporters and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the Navy conducted a review and in October upgraded the medal to the combat award.

The citation details his bravery.

When the ship capsized, he and “other members of the crew, became trapped in a compartment where only a small porthole provided outlet for escape.”

“With unselfish disregard for his own plight, he assisted his shipmates through the aperture. When they in turn were in the process of rescuing him, his body became tightly wedged in the narrow opening.